A Critical Look at Smart Wheelchairs
This addresses the gap in practical deployment for wheelchair users, but is incremental as it critiques existing research rather than introducing new solutions.
The paper tackles the problem of limited adoption of smart wheelchairs by identifying a mismatch between research and real-world usage, offering suggestions for future work without presenting new experimental results.
Research into smart wheelchairs has been conducted for decades, but we have yet to see the widespread use of this technology among full-time wheelchair users. We argue that the main reason for this is that there is a mismatch between research and the actualities of using a powered mobility device in the real world. Based on our own research experiences, we enumerate some of these disparities, and offer some suggestions for where work in smart wheelchairs might focus in the coming years.